Auctions

The art market is “neither frothy nor depressed”, according to Sotheby’s chief executive Tad Smith.

Leading a 75-lot Brontë collection sold by Forum Auctions (25/20/12% buyer’s premium) on July 10* was a set of two of the novels written by the sisters in the hugely productive years of 1846-47.

The unexpected highlight of a recent sale at Beurret & Bailly (20% buyer’s premium) in Basel was a work by the Finnish artist Akseli Gallen-Kallela (1865-1931) which had been considered lost for over a century.

Tim Goodman, former chairman of Sotheby’s Australia, is to relaunch his online auction house Fine Art Bourse (FAB) this month.

For many years auctioneers have been itching to move the finest arms and armour from the province of the specialist collector and establish them with a wider audience as works of art in their own right.

More 19th century art was offered in London when over 120 lots of European and Orientalist pictures went under the hammer at Christie’s.

The summer season brought a raft of modern art sales to continental Europe and the various salerooms around Germany were no exception.

Handsomely bound, a set of Gould’s Birds of Britain offered as part of the small but select Dorros ornithological library at Christie’s New York sale of June 15 failed against a $60,000-80,000 estimate, but in a Dominic Winter (19.5% buyer’s premium) sale of the previous day a very differently presented set brought a mid-estimate £36,000.

Sporting guns are a little different from other areas of the arms and armour market in that many that are well over 100 years old are still in use today.

Works by the Pre-Raphaelites and their followers continued to outperform the rest of the Victorian art market during the latest round of sales in London.

“With the exception of Dürer’s Apocalypse, the most influential woodcut programme from Germany was that of the Cologne Bible of 1478-79.”

Bid to £5000 at Bonhams (25/20/12% buyer’s premium) on June 14 was a 1593 first of Thomas Fale’s 'Horolographia. The Art of Dialling'.

It has been 50 years since Sotheby’s first held its annual August sporting guns sales at the prestigious Gleneagles Hotel in Perthshire.

Like many modern artists, John Bellany’s (1942-2013) canvases reflect his personal story – and his was a turbulent one.

More than 400 copper, tin and ceramic moulds, collected by the late antiques dealer Andrew Cottrell, were dispersed by timed auction at Bellmans (22% buyer’s premium) in Winchester on July 12.

Austrian artists figured prominently at the June 20-21 sale at Kinsky (26% buyer’s premium) in Vienna.

The biggest sensation at Scheublein (26% buyer’s premium) in Munich on June 30 was caused by an oil painting of American Indians from the mid-19th century. It was an oil study for a famous painting by Carl Ferdinand Wimar (1828-62), who also went by the name of Charles Wimar.

Sold for €62,500 (£54,825) by German auction house Kiefer (20% buyer’s premium) in a June 30-July 1 sale in Pforzheim was an 1867, Hamburg first edition of the first volume of Karl Marx’s 'Das Kapital'.